In August, Brian Greenspun turns over the Where I Stand column to guest writers. Today’s columnist, David Comarow, is a former faculty member of the College of Southern Nevada, where he established the Solar Energy Technology Training Program and the Center for Appropriate Technology in 1976, neither of which exists today. He is now a semi-retired patent attorney living in Las Vegas.
Nevada has a choice. Continue to survive hand-to-mouth, dependent entirely on the good fortunes of a single industry — one based on human frailty and excess wealth. Or seize the moment and become the next North Slope for America’s energy future.
Legislators and the governor are scrambling to cut spending by cutting back on expenditures such as textbook purchases. This is just a few short years since the previous governor rebated the state’s surplus by refunding automobile registration fees.
We continue to be myopic, responding only to emergencies and never investing in the future. But things are different now. The National Clean Energy Summit to be held in Las Vegas on Tuesday is a good sign.
Our state sits on (or perhaps more accurately, under) a massive and never-ending energy resource, free for the taking. It is time for our state, in partnership with the federal government and private industry, to build the largest solar energy system in the history of the world.
Such an undertaking would require a massive investment, but it would pay enormous benefits. It would employ tens of thousands of workers. It would provide affordable energy at a stable price for our state and for the rest of the nation.
We have enough public land suitable for photovoltaic and solar thermal generation to meet the electrical needs of the entire country. All we need is the will to do it.
When, in 1976, we established a solar energy technology training program at what is now the College of Southern Nevada, the technology was primitive and expensive. The best we could do cost-effectively was heat water and swimming pools.
Now the cost of solar electric production has come down by a factor of about 10 and increasing production promises to do for solar cells what it did for laptop computers. So what are we waiting for?
Industry analysts say photovoltaic energy production is near parity with other sources even without any government subsidy. By contrast, nuclear generation is nowhere near cost-effective when subsidies are taken into account.
Moreover, if Nevada puts its full faith and credit behind a “Solar North Slope” development project, our state could be reaping huge financial benefits forever, unlike with the Alaskan finite and depleting oil resource. This is the time. Nevada is the place.
We need to launch a bold state initiative to turn our massive deserts into energy collectors. We need to plant the seed, reinvest profits in expanding the solar array and eventually powering the nation. We did it on the heels of the Great Depression when we built Hoover Dam — on time and under budget, incidentally. We need to tap that can-do attitude once again.
If we get caught up in petty squabbling and turf wars, it won’t happen. So, Governor, Legislature, Congressmen, Senators, political candidates and industry leaders, hear my words:
We can do this now or we can wait a decade or two and complain that we should have done this when it first became clear we could. By then it may be too late. This is no longer a pipe dream. Solar is here and Nevada is absolutely the best place in North America for it.
The numbers are clear. We can produce all the electricity the country needs without generating any pollution. As the capacity grows we can use increasing amounts of power to produce hydrogen and oxygen from water and thus fuel a gradually modified land fleet of cars, trucks and trains. That will take perhaps 10 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product over a finite period of time, but once the infrastructure is in place, it will continue to produce all our energy needs for the indefinite future.
In 1961 John F. Kennedy pronounced that we would put men on the moon in a decade. At the time we had not even put a person into orbit. But we spent $25 billion and not only put men on the moon, but also employed 400,000 Americans and fired off the biggest burst of creative scientific development in the history of the planet.
It is time for that kind of national will once again. And Nevada is uniquely situated to be the center of that universe. But we cannot sit by and wait for the Washington politicians and lobbyists to do something — because they won’t. This is our state. Nevada, this is our time.
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